In the evolution of integrated circuits in semiconductor technology, there has been a trend towards device scaling. Scaling or reducing the size increases circuit performance, primarily by increasing circuit speed, and also increases the functional complexity of the integrated circuits. The number of devices per chip has increased throughout the years. When integrated circuits contained only a small number of devices per chip, the devices could be easily interconnected in a single level. However, the need to accommodate more devices and increased circuit speed has led to the use of multi-level or multi-layer interconnects.
In a multi-level interconnection system, the area needed by the interconnect lines is shared among two or more levels, which increases the active device fractional area, resulting in increased functional chip density. Implementing a multilevel interconnect process to a fabrication scheme increases the complexity of the manufacturing process. Typically, the active devices (e.g., the transistors, diodes, capacitors and other components) are manufactured in the lower layers of wafer processing. After the active devices are processed, the multilevel interconnects are usually formed.
As semiconductor devices continue to shrink, various aspects of multilevel interconnect processes are challenged. The propagation delay of integrated circuits becomes limited by the large RC time delay of interconnection lines when minimum feature size is decreased below about 1 μm, for example. Therefore, the industry is tending towards the use of different materials and processes to improve multilevel interconnect implementations. In particular, the change in the conductive materials and insulating materials used in multilevel interconnect schemes is proving challenging and requires a change in a number of processing parameters.
In the past, interconnect lines were made of aluminum. Now there is a trend towards the use of copper for interconnect lines because copper has a higher conductivity than aluminum. For many years, the insulating material used to isolate conductive lines from one another was silicon dioxide. Silicon dioxide has a dielectric constant (k) of approximately 4.0 or greater, where the dielectric constant value k is based on a scale where 1.0 represents the dielectric constant of vacuum. However, now there is a trend in the semiconductor industry towards the use of low-dielectric constant materials (e.g., having a dielectric constant k of 3.6 or less) for insulating materials.
Copper is a desirable conductive line material because it has a higher conductivity than aluminum. However, the RC (resistance/capacitance) time delay of copper conductive lines can be problematic, so low-dielectric constant materials are used to reduce the capacitive coupling and reduce the RC time delay between interconnect lines. However, copper easily migrates into low-dielectric constant materials, which can cause shorting and create device failures. To prevent this, liners are typically used to prevent the migration of copper into the adjacent low-dielectric constant material.
Some low-dielectric constant materials are porous, having a plurality of pores spaced throughout the dielectric material. Such porous low-dielectric constant materials may be deposited by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), or may be spun on in liquid solution and subsequently cured by heating to remove the solvent. Porous low-dielectric constant materials are advantageous in that they have a dielectric constant of 3.0 or less. Examples of such porous low-dielectric constant materials include porous SiLK™ and porous silicon carbonated oxide, as examples. A porogen may be included in the porous low-dielectric constant materials to cause the formation of the pores.
While porous low-dielectric constant materials are beneficial because of their low dielectric constant properties, they are disadvantageous in that the liners typically used as a diffusion barrier before the copper is deposited, such as Ta and/or TaN based materials, TiN, WN or tungsten carbo-nitride, do not line the inner surfaces of the pores of the porous low-dielectric constant materials on the sidewalls and other surfaces of the low-dielectric constant materials. Thus, copper comes into contact with the inner surfaces of the pores and can migrate through the low-dielectric constant material, causing shorts and device failures. Moisture can also become trapped in the unlined pores, causing oxidation of the copper and/or making the copper diffuse easier into the low-dielectric constant material, which is also a problem.
In addition, during advanced metal barrier deposition processes such as CVD and atomic layer deposition (ALD), precursor or reactant species can penetrate deep into interconnected pore structures of the low-dielectric constant materials. This can cause undesirable contamination, increased leakage, and reliability issues.
Therefore, what is needed in the art is a method of sealing the sidewalls of porous low-dielectric constant materials.